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Senate Staffers Told To Pretend Top Secret Documents Are Not Widely Available On Web

Senate employees and contractors are still supposed to treat this as classified

The Senate Security Office sent an email around the Hill Friday afternoon asking Senate employees and contractors to try to ignore the fact that top-secret, highly-classified documents are now floating around the Web freely (and, in the case of a terribly designed NSA Powerpoint, getting facelifts.) The email asks security managers to remind Senate employees and contractors that the documents are still technically classified and should be treated as if millions of people haven’t already read them. The email:

Please share with your staff the guidance below. · Classified information, whether or not posted on public websites, disclosed to the media, or otherwise in the public domain, remains classified and must be treated as such until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. government authority.

The director of national intelligence has declassified some information in light of the public debate, but the FISA court order, PRISM Powerpoint, NSA brochure, presidential order, as well as the “dozens” of newsworthy documents that Glenn Greenwald still plans to publish remain technically secret even if it’s a secret that anyone with an Internet connection can be let in on.

· Senate employees and contractors shall not, while accessing the web on unclassified government systems, access or download documents that are known or suspected to contain classified information.

Government employees are not supposed to keep classified documents just hanging around on their computers, but at this point, the battle to keep this particular set of documents secure has already been lost thanks to leaker Edward Snowden and his thumb drive. Rules are rules — even if they make little sense in light of current circumstances and seem like a serious impediment for the staffers tasked with supporting senators who need to have a policy debate about the revelations in the leaks.

· Senate employees and contractors who believe they may have inadvertently accessed or downloaded classified information via non-classified Senate systems, should contact the Office of Senate Security for assistance.

So, any staffer that’s been reading the Guardian now needs to call the Senate Security Office. Anyone who doesn’t call should be chastised for not keeping up with relevant news.

The Department of Defense sent around a similar email earlier this week, as reported by Wired. It appears to be standard — if inane — procedure after classified docs go viral. In 2010, U.S. agencies asked unauthorized employees not to access the classified material that came pouring out of Wikileaks in the form of videos and State Department cables. It’s a terrible attempt to chase cats around trying to get them back into bags. And worst of all, puts staffers in the uncomfortable position of breaking protocol by following links on Google News.

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As odd as the Senate Security Office email seems with its head-in-the-sand approach, it is legally correct as mere possession of classified documents by unauthorized government employees may constitute a crime or be the basis for disciplinary action even if the person possessing the documents did not obtain them illegally. That being said, I doubt that a Senate staffer downloading the documents from a publicly available source would be subject to any adverse action, but stranger things have happened. This sounds like it came from a career lawyer with too much time on their hands.

This is not as ridiculous as you might think. On ALL government computer systems, there are networks that are authorized for classified information, and networks which are not authorized for classified information. Putting classified data on a computer connected to an unclassified network is an administrative nightmare, even if that data comes from an external news source.

People are being instructed to do this to save the expense, paperwork, and overhead that is still required by regulations to physically scrub individual systems and networks.

It’s not that the IT staff doesn’t recognize that they are closing the barn door after all the horses have run off, but these are the rules by which they must abide.

This is an IT administrative issue, not a matter of telling people to ignore the obvious. These same instructions have also gone out to military IT managers, and I presume to ALL government IT managers.

There is nothing unusual, here. If you have an active security clearance, and have access to classified documents, you are not permitted to possess unauthorized documents, regardless of their source. Likewise, if you have received classified information, you cannot discuss it with unauthorized personnel, even if the same information is available from open sources.

It is an essential provision of security. You do not get to decide what is properly classified and what isn’t. That is up to the command authority.

Anyone in a position of power in 1941 is now dead. If you file a Freedom of Information act request for the 10 formal investigations into Pearl Harbor, they will show up with a great number of pages black lined. WHY? Too many things are top secret for the wrong reasons and this process needs to be reformed. Having secrets is fine, making everything secret is not. If its over 50 years old it should no longer be a secret.

You are partly correct. Some secrets should become public–the Pearl Harbor info is probably a good example (although there might be some harbor features that are still in use today that should remain secret–just guessing). But there are some secrets that should probably forever stay secret. For instance, atomic bomb designs and other similar data.

Part of the problem government (and contractor) employees have with classified (or potentially classified) data is that confirming (or not) that it is classified is itself classified. So, some of Snowden’s stuff may be true and some may be false. If knowledgeable people start looking at it and in some way confirming or denying some of it, that puts more classified info out there. Right now it’s status is “probably true”, but if it somehow gets separated into “confirmed true” and “confirmed false”, that’s more classified info than Snowden put out.

…. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge, which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia ….

“Gentlemen, you know as well as I, that the fourth amendment hasn’t effectively existed since this program came into being. However, for old times’ sake, we’re going to play pretendsies a while longer.”

Might as well tell them: Stick your heads in a glass bottle, just pretend that its still sand.

Makes me want to take a stick to the idiots.

I’ve always felt that the problem with ubiquitous surveillance would be its unequal access.

Politicians, other 1%ers and their minions among the 99%ers always feel that they and only they should have access to the data.

That is what being “Big Brother” is all about…

If the fruits of this ubiquitous surveillance, the mined data, meta or not, was made universally accessible in real-time to all, just by Googling it, it would be truly earth shaking and civilization altering.

The level of criminality, typically the planned kind as opposed to the opportunistic violent kind , would rapidly drop because people would realize that they couldn’t hope to get away with it and be forced to find some other legal way to provide value for money exchanged.

There is stuff from WWI that is still classified top secret. The point being is the top secret label is applied to almost everything. I remember a tell years ago about this young man charged with selling top secrets to China and it turns out all he was doing was getting Popular Science magazines from his local news stand and mailing them to friends in China. The US government was saying the stuff that was in the Popular Science magazines was classified top secret. I can not remember how it all ended.